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How to be Human: A Beginner’s Blueprint By Zoha Khan

Writer: Tin Can PoetryTin Can Poetry

1. Arise: Shake the lingering caress of sleep from your eyes and flail your limbs

poetically toward the ceiling. Feel the creaking of the floorboards beneath your skin

rattling for want of use.


2. Beautify: The best way to be human is to never let them know you are one: Nobody is

old or blemished, just raw. How much are you willing to burn?


3. Nourish: They need you in working order. Grind fruit and veg and other good for you

things into a mulchy pulp, ensure those joints are well oiled. You mustn't creak when you walk, it signifies age and to age is to be real. They don’t want reality, they want perfection.


System Error: Laugh maniacally, feel it rumble in the pits of your gut, rippling down the tail of your nerves and sending aftershocks radiating through your body. Smile in a lopsided,

eccentric manner, show off your yellowing teeth like pearls around your neck.


4. Transport: Stagnation is indolence. Whatever you do, Don’t Stop Moving, chug

inordinate amounts of black coffee behind the steering wheel, keep your eyes on the

road ahead. Walk until your feet are blistered like craters on the moon but don’t stop

reaching for the stars.


5. Do Something Substantial, preferably Profitable: Work. Squeeze your brain like an

orange and suck the sweet, naive juice from its core, ladle your creativity into the cup

of your superiors that they may never suffer dehydration.


6. Polish: Harbour hobbies. Splice your spare time into neatly measured cubes and allot

each one a purpose. Be entertained but never lull yourself to idle comfort. Stay poised

on the edge, ready to jump to order as required.


System Error: Amble, meander aimlessly with a head full of daisies, close your eyes and

think of nothing at all. Dance haphazardly and become undone, slouch your shoulders

because it feels good, take a midday nap.


7. Surround yourself with people: Merge into the crowd, curl yourself inwards and roll

with the masses,  pick your words carefully but launch them as if they are weightless.

Don’t appear aloof or uninterested, they will mark you off as faulty and shun you to

the abyss of Loneliness.


8. Strive: Scrounge the murky alleys for Aspiration, spy it slinking lithely along electric

fences like a street cat. Stuff it into the pockets of your coat and grip it to your chest.

You must always want more, do more, be more.


9. Reproduce: String your bloodline out inch by inch like a kite’s string until it’s soaring

with the greats. Birth flawless workers, pray for prettiness plastered on their face or

wish for genius stamped within their eyes. Whatever you do, don’t rear foolish,

unsightly babies, they will only leave you with a bitter aftertaste and hollow pocket.


System Error: Raise revolutionaries. Let them loose upon this twisted world like sailboats in a school of fish, don’t make them swim around the tank. Watch them seize the reins with

open arms and kind hearts, and minds that have no limit but the skull.


10. WAKE UP: WAKE UP, WAKE UP please please before you’re lost to the void I

implore you, WAKE---.......


System Shutdown Initiated. Blueprint Unsuccessful.


Happy Humaning.

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